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Jel Classification:D31 

Working Paper
Wealth Distribution and Retirement Preparation among Early Savers

This paper develops a new combined-wealth measure by augmenting data on net worth from the Survey of Consumer Finances with estimates of defined benefit (DB) pension and expected Social Security wealth. We use this concept to explore retirement preparation among two groups of households in pre-retirement years (aged 40 through 49 and 50 through 59), and to explore the concentration of wealth. We find evidence of moderate, but rising, shortfalls in retirement preparation. We also show that including DB pension and Social Security wealth results in markedly lower measures of wealth ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-4

Report
Estimating HANK for Central Banks

We provide a toolkit for efficient online estimation of heterogeneous agent (HA) New Keynesian (NK) models based on Sequential Monte Carlo methods. We use this toolkit to compare the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of a prominent HANK model, Bayer et al. (2022), to that of the representative agent (RA) NK model of Smets and Wouters (2007, SW). We find that HANK’s accuracy for real activity variables is notably inferior to that of SW. The results for consumption in particular are disappointing since the main difference between RANK and HANK is the replacement of the RA Euler equation with ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1071

Journal Article
Asset Holdings of Young Households: Trends and Patterns

The authors use multiple waves of the triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) from 1989 to 2013 to examine the composition of the asset portfolios of young households whose head of household is between 18 and 41 years of age. The focus is on households? decisions to hold different types of assets, including both financial assets (e.g., bank accounts, stocks, and retirement accounts) and nonfinancial assets (e.g., residential real estate, businesses, and automobiles). The authors describe the patterns of acquisition of broad asset categories in the early part of the life cycle with ...
Review , Volume 96 , Issue 4 , Pages 391-411

Working Paper
Saving Constraints, Debt, and the Credit Market Response to Fiscal Stimulus

We document that the interest rate response to fiscal stimulus (IRRF) is lower in countries with high inequality or high household debt. To interpret this evidence we develop a model in which households take on debt to maintain a consumption threshold (saving constraint). Now debt-burdened, these households use additional income to deleverage. In economies with more debt-burdened households, increases in government spending tighten credit conditions less (relax credit conditions more), leading to smaller increases (larger declines) in the interest rate. Our theoretical framework predicts that ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-07

Working Paper
Incarceration, Earnings, and Race

Working Paper , Paper 21-11`

Working Paper
Trade and Inequality in an Overlapping Generations Model with Capital Accumulation

We study the lifecycle aspect of within-country inequality that stems from capital and labor services supplied by individuals. Our environment is a combination of a multicountry trade model and an overlapping generations model with production and capital accumulation. Trade liberalization increases the measured total factor productivity in each country, which increases the marginal product of capital and incentivizes capital accumulation. Higher capital stock and higher measured productivity raise the marginal product of labor and, hence, wages. Inequality, measured by the ratio of old ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-018

Working Paper
Enhanced Unemployment Insurance Benefits in the United States during COVID-19: Equity and Efficiency

We assess the effects of the historically unprecedented expansion of U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) payments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The adverse economic impacts of the pandemic, notably the pattern of job losses and earnings reductions, were disproportionately born by lower-income individuals. Focusing on household income as a broad measure of well-being, we document that UI payments almost completely offset the increase in household income inequality that otherwise would have occurred in 2020 and 2021. We also examine the impacts of the $600 increase in weekly UI benefit payments, ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2024-15

Working Paper
Measuring Income and Wealth at the Top Using Administrative and Survey Data

Administrative tax data indicate that U.S. top income and wealth shares are substantial and increasing rapidly (Piketty and Saez 2003, Saez and Zucman 2014). A key reason for using administrative data to measure top shares is to overcome the under-representation of families at the very top that plagues most household surveys. However, using tax records alone restricts the unit of analysis for measuring economic resources, limits the concepts of income and wealth being measured, and imposes a rigid correlation between income and wealth. The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) solves the ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2015-30

Journal Article
Risk Aversion at the Country Level

This article estimates the coefficient of relative risk aversion for 75 countries using data on self-reports of personal well-being from the 2006 Gallup World Poll. The analysis suggests that the coefficient of relative risk aversion varies closely around 1, which corresponds to a logarithmic utility function. The authors conclude that their results support the use of the log utility function in numerical simulations of economic models.
Review , Volume 97 , Issue 1 , Pages 53-66

Working Paper
Distributional Effects of Payment Card Pricing and Merchant Cost Pass-through in the United States and Canada

Using data from the United States and Canada, we quantify consumers’ net pecuniary cost of using cash, credit cards, and debit cards for purchases across income cohorts. The net cost includes fees paid to financial institutions, rewards received from credit or debit card issuers, and the merchant cost of accepting payments that is passed on to consumers as higher retail prices. Even though credit cards are more expensive for merchants to accept compared with other payment methods, merchants typically do not differentiate prices at checkout, but instead pass through their costs to all ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-13

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Larrimore, Jeff 13 items

Thompson, Jeffrey P. 13 items

Athreya, Kartik B. 12 items

Mather, Ryan 11 items

Mustre-del-Rio, Jose 11 items

Sanchez, Juan M. 11 items

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E21 51 items

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inequality 29 items

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